The Weight of Yes

Prior to this moment, Jacob and I had already agreed that when the email finally came, we wouldn't open the profiles until we could do it together. I didn't want to jump ahead and form opinions about a family before Jacob even had the opportunity to read their story.

I did, however, sneak a peek.

I skimmed just enough of the email to see a few basic facts about the embryos: the year they were created, the developmental day they were frozen, and the mother's age at egg retrieval. Then I stopped myself. I didn't open the attached medical information or family profiles.

A few minutes later, my friend arrived, and we headed into the pool. I told her we had been matched and shared the little bit of information I had learned. Looking back, I'm incredibly grateful for the conversation that followed.

One of the things about IVF that seems obvious once someone points it out, but that I honestly hadn't considered very much until this moment, is that many couples pursue IVF later in their reproductive years. Later marriages, higher levels of education, career goals, infertility itself, and many other factors often mean women are older by the time embryos are created. We were told this during our pre-matching consultation, especially when we insisted that we did not want to consider families that had used donor eggs. The agency made it clear that maternal age for embryos created using the genetic mother’s eggs would be higher, and it is one of the biggest reasons to consider embryos created with donor gametes. At that point, we decided the risk of more limited medical information outweighed the risk of potentially older eggs. That may sound incredibly crude when you remember there are actual people on the other side of that calculation, and it is. But at that point in the process, it was a lot easier to think in practical terms than personal ones.

The friend sitting beside me that afternoon was currently experiencing a pregnancy later in life.  She candidly shared some of the fears, relief, and other emotional ups and downs of her journey to motherhood. More than that, she shared the encouragement she drew from other women she knew (and I did as well) who had healthy pregnancies on similar timelines.

It was a strange balance to hold. On one hand, I had known going in that if we weren't open to donor eggs, we would almost certainly be adopting embryos created by someone older than I was. On the other hand, seeing an actual number suddenly made all those research papers feel less abstract and more glaringly specific. She gently reminded me that while statistics are important to understand, they still can only take you so far. They also do not dictate specific outcomes, only describe them en masse. I appreciated her honesty and perspective more than she probably realizes.

For the first time, I knew one real piece of the puzzle. At the same time, something else was becoming very real. This was no longer an anonymous embryo. This was a real family's child.

It threw me back into wrestling again with a question I thought I had already answered. How much did I truly believe every embryo deserved a chance at life? And what was fair to ask of my own body in the process? I don’t take lightly the potentially greater risk of a miscarriage.

I stayed at the pool until Jacob got home from work. It was a welcome distraction. He met me there and as we walked back toward the parking lot, I asked whether he had checked his personal email. He hadn't, so I told him what was waiting in his inbox.

As I opened the first profile later that evening, I met a beautiful family I found myself drawn to almost immediately. Parts of their story made me laugh out loud. Some of their pictures looked remarkably like photos I could imagine taking of our own son. Their personalities felt genuine. Their story was beautiful. Their hardships were real.

Logistically, they live close enough that the kind of relationship we hope for someday, even one that includes seeing each other in person, felt entirely possible. They seemed to share many of our values and beliefs. In a beautiful coincidence, their oldest child even shares our son's name. But what affected me most wasn't any of those things. It was reading about the hopes and dreams they already held for this little embryo.

Up to this point, it had been difficult to fully wrap our minds around the embryo adoption matching process. We had prepared ourselves, at least theoretically, to adopt, carry, give birth to, and raise a child who would not be genetically related to us. But sitting there, reading another family's hopes for this child they were considering entrusting to us, everything suddenly became real.

The weight of that responsibility settled heavily over both of us, but especially over Jacob. We finished reading the profile. Jacob quietly set his phone down and cried. We grieved that this was the path we found ourselves walking. We feared whether we could love and raise this child in a way that honored the trust this family was placing in us. And there was the quiet realization that this child would have to be intentionally woven into our hearts, our minds, and our family. They wouldn’t simply already be there because they came from us.

At this point, I want to share something that I hope is freeing for someone else. The emotion I felt leading up to sitting down and opening those profiles wasn't necessarily excitement. If an emotional scale exists with anticipation on one end and dread on the other, I would have called what I felt probably slightly left of center. Jacob probably would have told you he was slightly right.

"Are you excited?"—or perhaps even more difficult—"You must be so excited!" were some of my least favorite comments during my first pregnancy. I've done my best not to ask that question of someone expecting a baby ever since, especially if it's their first. Our culture doesn't always know what to do with emotions that don't fit neatly into a single expected category. A baby is joyful. It is exciting. But it also carries enormous life change, unknowns, potential complications, and a steep learning curve that, in my opinion, no one can fully understand until they're living it.

That's what this felt like too.

Deciding how we felt about a family we had never met who was offering us such an extraordinary gift was exciting, but also slightly terrifying.

After sitting quietly for a while, we opened the second profile. This experience felt different. There was something I couldn't quite name. Nothing was wrong, but after how naturally we had connected with the first family's story, this one simply didn't resonate in the same way.

When we finished reading, we mostly sat in silence. Jacob decided he needed to sleep on it. I did my best to resist my overwhelming desire to externally process and instead gave him the space he needed.

Looking back, I think I needed that space too.

Almost as soon as Jacob fell asleep on the couch, the noise in my own mind became unexpectedly quiet. I don't know exactly how to explain what happened next except to say that I experienced a deep sense of peace. I very clearly sensed that we were supposed to move forward with the first family, respectfully decline the second match, and not request another one.

Our original position was to match with one family, if possible. In that moment, I finally understood why. It felt wrong not to go all in with a family that was going all in with us. I spent much of that night praying that what I was sensing was the Holy Spirit and not merely my own intuition. I slept terribly. Annoyingly, Jacob slept like a rock. I have to confess I was a little irritated the next morning when we both checked our sleep scores and found mine to be hovering around 67% while his was a perfect 100%. I still don't fully understand that man.

I'm grateful, though, that I waited. The next morning, over our usual coffee, the atmosphere had completely changed. The night before, Jacob had seemed overwhelmed and shaken. Now he looked hopeful, maybe even excited. He was ready to decide. It goes without saying that I had already made a decision, but you know that’s just how things work in our household. 

Without me saying a word, he shared the same conviction I had come to during the night. We also shared an unexpectedly funny moment. The evening before, I kept thinking their children looked remarkably familiar. As we talked the next morning, Jacob asked, "Did you notice their kids looked really familiar?" I laughed. "I was thinking the same thing," I replied. Sure enough, we had both realized they reminded us of the same family from church.

There was one remaining medical question we wanted answered, not because it was make-or-break, but because it would help us move forward with greater confidence. We sent our question to the agency and received a response later that day. That evening, we made our decision and the next morning sent our official response.

Later that afternoon, our coordinator asked us to write a short note to the family whose match we would be declining. We worked carefully on every word. Even though we believed we were making the right decision, we never wanted another family to feel anything less than deeply respected and profoundly appreciated for considering us.

There were still many steps ahead.

More paperwork.

More waiting.

More decisions.

But for the first time, this journey no longer felt quite so theoretical. There were now faces, names, people. A family we now had the opportunity to get to know and, together, discover a new facet of what that word means.