First of all, a BIG thank you to my wonderful commenters. I always feel so heartened to hear your kind words of support. That you are always here for me means so much.
Friday night was even better than I’d hoped. The pizza base was the best I’ve made yet, and I got a delightful surprise in the topping department. As I made my way to the post office before coming home I noticed a Blue Cow delivery truck at the local gourmet shop and thought to myself “Well there is always a chance that it has delivered some bocconcini, so it’s worth a quick look.” Having been disappointed there was no decent mozzarella to be had in town, that was going to be my next best option. I hadn’t bargained for an even better option, but this is what appeared. Shaw River Buffalo Mozzarella. They don’t actually stock this for customers as it is hideously expensive and no one except me would buy it (and not even then on a very regular basis). However, one of the owners is a good friend of mine, and she sometimes gets a 1.5 litre bucket and shares it between a few people on the ‘black market’. On Friday, she’d ordered a bucket for some tasting demo the group were putting on Saturday night, so she let me take the whole bucket down to one of the cafes, ask the owner to transfer 2 balls to a container for me, and then she collected the rest of the bucket later on. I’ll pay her when I see her next. How amazing is that? I didn’t even dare to ask the Universe for such good fortune, and yet it appeared. I actually felt blessed and skipped all the way home.
On the way I stopped at the local DVD rental shop, where I’d spent hours perusing in vain over the last week or so, hoping that I could find something fairly light, with a good plot, good acting, and some substance to the script. What an ask. Yet I didn’t spend long looking, randomly pulled something off the shelf, only half read the back and thought “I’m not sure why I’m choosing this, but I just am”. Turned out to be just the thing. The Brothers’ Bloom. A grand romp.
When I arrived home, I put my shopping away and opened itunes ready for radio streaming some groovy pizza cooking tunes, and I checked my email while I was at it, like I do about five times a day. There in my inbox was a reply to a plea I put out on a site called bub hub, for a gestational surrogate. I’ve had a few of these replies over the past six months and I haven’t written much about how my search is going because, quite frankly, it’s not going that well. I haven’t been particularly hard-arsed about plugging my wares or pleading my case in every nook and cranny of the internet, preferring to take the approach of “if it happens, it happens”. And it hasn’t been happening. A few women would reply to me and say their husbands had forbid them to do surrogacy and they wished me the best in my search, but more often they would send me an email asking if I was still interested in using a surrogate, and when I replied in the affirmative and brought them up to speed on my situation, I just never heard from them again. Frankly, it’s been somewhat disheartening.
Imagine my surprise when, scant minutes after I replied in the affirmative to this Friday night email, a reply came back! We e-mailed a couple more times before I had to go and attend to my pizza, and she to her childrens’ bathtime. Unprecedented. I was stunned. We ‘friended’ each other on facebook, and I discovered she lives in Perth -wow – to not have to factor in interstate travel would be such a boon. I feel a strong connection with her already: she seems like a genuine, straightforward, honest, kind person, and I haven’t felt an immediate attachment to any potential surrogate in this way since the first one I met six months ago, and missed out on by a week because she’d already agreed to go with a couple in Queensland (even though she was also from Perth).
So not only had the Universe delivered me some unasked-for top-of-the-range mozzarella, it surpassed all expectations and delivered me a big bag of hope. Yes, hope. The ‘confident expectation’ kind of hope. See, if we can get through all the tedious and (apparently very difficult) legal hoopla that surrounds surrogacy in this State, then it is possible for me to believe I could actually take home a child at some point in the next year or two. With a womb that has a good proven track record, and eggs that also have a good proven track record, I could stand as good a chance as any fertile at a live birth.
And in this way, I can begin to imagine a Disney ending for myself. I can’t tell you how precious that kind of real hope feels. Even if, for whatever reason, we don’t end up pulling it off, just to be able to genuinely imagine that it really is possible – that opens so many doors in my heart that might allow me to live a little happier while the future unfolds, that it is a gift in itself.
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