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This is a story that spans multiple countries and years, but I’m going to start in Morocco. Late September 2024. My husband, Rahul, and I were driving along an open stretch of highway from Essaouira to Marrakech as part of a longer seven-week sabbatical trip through Greece, Morocco, and India. We’d fallen in love with Essaouira’s breezy coastline and bohemian feel, but instead of reflecting on the destination while gazing out the window as I usually do on long car rides, I was frantically ChatGPT-ing in the backseat: “Why am I spotting?” “Is it normal to bleed in possible early pregnancy?” “How do I know if I’m having another early miscarriage?”
I was, in fact, having another early miscarriage (also known as a chemical pregnancy). I know that now, to the extent I can know it without a visit to my fertility doctor back in New York, based on all the additional symptoms that followed. But I also know that, despite the initial heartbreak, experiencing it while traveling was actually a blessing too—because it helped me find peace with the difficult decision we came to: to use a surrogate.
Over the past three and a half years, Rahul and I have gone through eight brutal rounds of IVF, not to mention countless IUIs and various surgeries. Nothing has worked. By all accounts, we’re textbook candidates for surrogacy, not least because the causes of my infertility are varied and complicated. I have a low ovarian reserve, endometriosis, and a high autoimmune response to pregnancy—meaning my immune system tends to attack our embryos as soon as they enter my body. No one really knows why I have all these issues (women’s health, the understudied mystery that keeps on giving), let alone how to solve them. This is why surrogacy is a logical option for us. Why risk the likelihood of another failed implantation with our precious embryos when there could be a success?
And yet. For all the surrogacy success stories out there, for all the reasons I hope it will be our saving grace, I was still wishy-washy about the whole thing until this sabbatical trip. It wasn’t so much that I yearned to carry my baby in my own body; I actually felt fine relinquishing control on that front. Fortunately, the expense was somewhat manageable too, and I’m so grateful for that. To me, resorting to surrogacy simply felt like failure. Like I hadn t done enough to make pregnancy work in my own body. Surrogacy makes sense for people who have no other way to become pregnant, I told myself, but infertility? Really? Surely there must be a way. Surely I had not tried hard enough to make it happen on my own. Surely there was something else I could do.
Which brings me to Greece, where Rahul and I had kicked off our trip earlier in September.
If you have ever been to Greece, you’ve probably talked and posted a lot about that magical trip to Greece. It’s just that kind of country, the kind that seeps into your spirit and makes you question if you’re even really living back home, because shouldn’t life always be this sweet? The water, the warmth (both of the air and the people), the wine…Greece seems to have it all figured out. And for the first three and a half weeks of September, Rahul and I felt like we did, too. We hopped all over the country, from the Ionian island Paxos to Monemvasia and Nafplio in the Peloponnese region, to Athens and to the beloved Cycladic islands of Milos and Sifnos. Somewhere along the way, between the sun-soaked boat rides and the carafes of Assyrtiko and the sparkly morning dips and all of the spinach pies, I conceived naturally—a first for me without a medical assist.
I was on Sifnos when I found out. In what I can only describe as a “simple twist of fate,” a fellow traveler came up to me and Rahul as we were walking back up the winding stone path that leads down to the Church of the Seven Martyrs, an iconic whitewashed chapel perched on a rugged, windswept cliff that juts into the Aegean Sea.
“This is random,” she said, “but it looked like you two were having a spiritual moment down there as you were walking around the church. I can’t explain it, but I felt it, so I took some photos of you and would love to Airdrop them to you.”
What? Who does that? We were obviously touched, and thanked her profusely for the candids before continuing on our walk into the ancient village of Kastro. Once we arrived, we popped into a seaside taverna, Captain George, for some fried sardines and a carafe of house rosé. I was in the bathroom there when I saw it: the implantation bleeding (an early sign of pregnancy). And my first thought was: How did that traveler who took our photos know?
When you’re struggling with infertility, people love to tell you to just relax. “It’ll happen when you stop thinking about it,” or “Just drink a bottle of wine and have fun,” or “Maybe you should go on vacation.” For years, I’d told anyone who would listen how triggering those unsolicited comments could be. They made me feel like my infertility was my own fault, not the result of an actual medical disease. So you can imagine my surprise when I did all of the things everyone always says to do, and…It actually worked. Without IVF. Drink a bottle of wine and relax? Check. Go on vacation? Check again. Stop thinking about it entirely? Well, almost check. It’s hard to get away from it all when “it all” is largely in your phone, but to the extent that we could, we did. And I was on my way to motherhood.
Until I wasn’t.
About a week after Sifnos, just as ChatGPT was helping me realize I was likely having an early miscarriage in Morocco, our driver pulled over to the side of the road. He’d spotted the goats. Before our road trip, Rahul and I had read about these goats that climb argan trees in pursuit of their favorite fruit, and we’d asked our driver to keep his eyes peeled and stop the car if he saw them. They’re most famously seen on the side of the highway between Essaouira and Marrakech. But despite my previous desire to see the tree-climbing goats, the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was get out of the car. I’d just found out I was having a chemical pregnancy, and all I wanted to do was wallow. I got out anyway, though, if nothing else to get some fresh air. As soon as I did, a Moroccan woman wearing a flowery pink skirt and a dark green scarf came up to me and placed a baby goat right into my arms. This goat was presumably too young to climb trees with the others, but it was not too young to cuddle, and it burrowed into my chest.
“Do you know what a baby goat is called?” Rahul asked me when we got back into the car to continue our journey to Marrakech. I shook my head, no. “A kid,” he replied.
It was the symbolism I didn’t know I needed. A woman quite literally placed a kid in my arms at the exact moment I realized I may be losing one of my own. A metaphor for surrogacy if ever there was one. And all at once, everything became clear: Surrogacy was indeed the answer. Why was I trying to fight it?
Before Rahul and I had taken off on our sabbatical adventure in September, we’d officially signed with an agency—but even then, I was not fully on board. There was still room to back out and get a refund until we got matched with someone, so I thought: Maybe this is the thing I need to do to make it happen in my own body. Maybe this is how I will trick my mind into getting pregnant naturally. I’d heard stories of women who signed with surrogate agencies, and then poof! They finally got pregnant on their own. Maybe that will happen to me. Anyone who has ever struggled with infertility knows these are the mind games we play with ourselves. But the fact that it did happen to me—on the most relaxing trip of all time, no less—and it still didn’t work? That sealed the surrogacy deal in my eyes.
There is so much shame and self-blame around infertility, especially for women, who are often made to feel like this is somehow our fault. It’s not. I am living proof of that. If I were actually “too stressed” to get pregnant, or it wasn’t “meant to be,” or whatever else people say, the sabbatical trip would have been the place to prove that theory wrong. The plot points were all there! We traveled, we drank the wine, and we relaxed in the sun. We signed with a surrogate agency before the trip, which would, in theory, “take the stress off.” We had a surreal church encounter with a fellow adventurer in Sifnos who somehow knew something spiritual was happening. We even left a 10 euro donation for a fertility tama (a small metal Greek Orthodox charm left in churches to seek blessings) at a church in Nafplio just two weeks before that. But despite conceiving in the most fateful, heady way possible, it still didn’t work—reminding me once and for all that mine is clearly a biological issue, not a stress issue, and has been for all three and a half trying years of trying.
I have no idea if surrogacy will even pan out for us, whether I’ll ever have a (human) kid placed into my arms. We are still in the beginning stages of the process—it’s a long one. And the truth is, I still can’t quite believe Rahul and I had to make this decision in the first place, even though I’m so grateful—in today’s political climate, especially—it was even ours to make. But as those in the infertility community know, this entire situation is filled with all sorts of next steps you may have never imagined you’d take, like choosing to use an egg donor. Or a sperm donor. Or doing more IVF than you’d like to do. I’m told by people on the other side that the way you become a parent feels like a distinction without a difference anyway, because your baby is your baby no matter how it happens. And thanks to the much-needed perspective travel so often provides, I see that now. My infertility journey has been and will continue to be a very bumpy ride. But it’s okay if one of those bumps—the baby bump—is not my own.
