Surrogacy Cost Tracker

TW: pregnancy loss

It had been fun for Theo to create the spreadsheet. It was the project manager in him, the evergreen student, the nerd. Certainly it was helpful to have a way to keep track of all the costs that go along with surrogacy, but need he have gone that far? Probably not. 

Theo used to look at the spreadsheet every day, even if there was nothing new to check off or enter into one of the waiting cells. He enjoyed seeing all that was ahead, and, more importantly, all that was behind them, all the milestones they had met, how far they had come. He would open the spreadsheet with his morning coffee and smile, somehow unbelieving of what was happening for him and Neil. 

But now, Theo couldn’t bring himself to smile at the spreadsheet, which looked like the Easter bunny had consulted with the 1970s to design the color scheme–mustard yellows, pea greens, pastel purple, and a strange pink somewhere between watermelon and coral. He hated it. He hated the colors he chose. He hated the empty cells that would never be filled. He hated the cells that had been filled but, somehow, in vain. In vain. He shook his head at the thought. 

He imagined filling all these cells back up, tracking each and every cost, every event, again and again and again. What if they’re always doomed to go back to the start? Back to cell A1 had become his unwanted mantra, his intrusive thought. Could he do it? He didn’t think he could. 

He zeroed in on the group of cells he had slated for this month, December. Menacing eyes stared back at him. He pressed the up arrow key. The blue cell outline moved silently upward from one cell to the other, proudly showing him where he was on the spreadsheet but completely oblivious to the gravity of the contents it passed over. 

December Total: $0.00

Monthly allowance: $0.00

Insurance: $0.00

Compensation: $0.00

They finally did it three months after the fact. Mostly it was Theo who wasn’t ready, wanting to have them at home with them for just a little bit longer. But then Neil suggested they do it before they tried again, as a way to say goodbye, but also open themselves up to anything else that might come. 

When they stood on the shore with that impossibly small bag of their ashes, he found he couldn’t speak. He thought he had so many things to say, but when he went to say them, nothing came out. His head had finally caught up with what his heart already knew–there weren’t words for this. Not really. Neil stared at him, surprised at his silence, but all Theo could do was shake his head. 

We love you, and we always will. 

Neil’s words were simple but shocking in how right they were. Theo had not expected this of Neil, and he felt his heart warm in a way that it hadn’t in quite some time. Theo nodded, and they let them go. 

Theo will never forget the way the waves seemed to embrace the ashes–warmly, softly, carefully picking them up and whisking them away to eternal safety. 

November Total: $1,042.44

Monthly Allowance: $400.00 (Final)

Insurance: $642.44 (Final)

Compensation: $0.00

November was a slog of going through the motions. He went to work, even traveled for work, visited his sister in Chicago, had his brother and his family down for Thanksgiving. But he could barely keep up with it all–with the rushing river of life, with the world inexplicably moving on. 

With Neil moving on. 

How can we think about next steps right now? 

This was what they argued about those weeks. 

You’re going too fast, Theo would say. I don’t understand why you’re doing this. Why are you pushing us so much?

Because I don’t know what else to do. 

Life had already cut Lena, their surrogate, out of their lives. Neil, in his pain, shut her out, disguising his choice and feelings behind the process. For Theo, he wanted to reach out, wanted to have that contact, but he struggled with the right words. After a few messages over the weeks right after and sending flowers with a long thank you note, they stopped talking. 

At the end of the month, when he went to log the final payments in the spreadsheet, he found himself conflicted at the twisted connection that still existed between them and always would. It bothered him that they were still paying her, now two months on. He knew why. He knew she was recovering. He knew it was the right thing to do. But as he lay in bed at night, desperate for sleep and unable to find it, one thought ran rampant: We paid for nothing.

Then he would be racked with guilt and would rush to the bathroom, his mouth watering, his stomach roiling. But nothing would ever come. The feeling would just sit there in his belly, stubborn and relentless. What if Lena was lying in her bed on the other side of LA county thinking the exact same thing? They paid for nothing. 

October Total: $2,242.44

Monthly Allowance: $400.00

Insurance: $642.44

Bed Rest Fee: $1,200.00

He picked their ashes up on his birthday. This sounds worse on paper than it actually was. A shitty birthday? For sure. But he also saw it as a small moment of closure, or at least the start of a closure that he hoped would come later. 

Neil was out of town, which was a whole other thing. He had already planned a trip home to Hong Kong, and Theo had opted not to go with him so he could save his vacation days for paternity leave. But Neil decided to still go. 

Neil left Theo. 

Theo chose not to think of it this way. He decided to think of it as momentum, as a chain of events that would stay in the order they were laid out. And, Theo thought, maybe Neil needed space. Neil had never said and would never say this to Theo, of course. Theo could only ever imagine what was going on inside Neil’s head, but this conjecture made some sense to Theo, and that’s what he went with. 

Theo wasn’t quite sure what he expected when he got to the mortuary. A bustling office of workers preparing the day’s funerals? A sad orchestra to play him in and out? A wise hand on his to acknowledge the debilitating pain of his loss? 

But there was none of that. He was simply another person coming to pick up ashes, which meant signing a couple of forms and waiting awkwardly at the front desk for someone to bring them out. The person from behind the desk came back with three teddy bears: a larger one with an opening in its back where a small plastic bag with their ashes was tucked and two smaller ones with blue ribbons. If he thinks too hard about it, Theo doesn’t understand why he was given teddy bears in place of his sons. 

Afterwards he drove to the nearest Chipotle and ate carnitas while the bears waited outside in the car under the Southern California autumn sun. 

This is 38, he thought.  

September Total: $7,542.44 

Monthly Allowance: $400.00

Insurance: $642.44 

C-Section Fee: $2,900.00

Prorated Compensation: $1,800.00

Bed Rest Fee: $600.00

Lost Wages (for companion): $1,200.00

They smelled like pennies. He knew why, but he hadn’t expected it. Later, Theo would torture himself with the thought that all babies born at 18 weeks and 6 days have that smell, that not only were they deprived of life but also of that new baby smell, which only comes starting at 19 weeks, that they were about to be donned with that sweetness, but they didn’t quite make it to that fragrant threshold. He mostly thought it cruel, the smell, it somehow ruining something already beyond ruin.

Couldn’t I just be in this moment without you in my nostrils, without you making me feel sick? 

What Theo didn’t know at the time was that the smell was a connection. The strongest of memories. The type of memory that acts like a time machine. Like in the summer when he’s on a walk with his dog and he catches a whiff of the sweet smell of smoke from a grill and suddenly he’s 16 again and playing with his siblings in the pool at his childhood home in Missouri while his dad cooks steaks. 

They set their babies down that day, never to pick them up again, but their smell lingered. It stuck to his skin like the reek left on his hands after handling coins. And now that moment with them in the hospital and every present moment without them is bound by the smell of the loose change rolling around in his car. 

August Total: $6,292.44

Monthly Allowance: $400.00

Insurance: $642.44 

Compensation: $4,500.00

Maternity Clothing Allowance: $750.00

Neil’s sister-in-law, Ann, and her three kids came to visit from Hong Kong. Theo asked Neil if he was going to tell her about the babies. He wasn’t quite sure why this was so important to him. Partly, Theo thought, it was just that he was excited and wanted to share the news with as many people as possible, having grown more comfortable with the idea of doing so. But also, he assumed it should be important to Neil to tell them, just as it was for Theo to tell his family. Theo decided this was a normal thing for him to want. 

But Neil wasn’t out to Ann or anyone else in his family. Having them at their house (their house) was perhaps a sort of coming out (scandalously, they did share a room), but, as far as Theo knew, no words on the topic were actually exchanged. Though there was that awkward conversation that he had with Ann while he was driving her and her two sons back from the San Diego Zoo, when Ann told him a long story involving Neil’s best friend (a woman) and some unrequited love. Theo couldn’t help but feel like Ann was telling two stories at once, or somehow saying something about himself, and he could only manage to respond with an occasional mmhmm and I see… He asked Neil about it later, but Neil just laughed, chalking it up to a meddling sister-in-law. 

So while Theo understood why Neil might not tell them, as it would require several conversations, not just one—and Theo resented that their type of family was the type that required conversations and coming outs—he still wished Neil would do it for his own sake, their sake, their growing babies’ sake. 

But Neil never told Ann or anyone else in his family, and then he never needed to. 

July Total: $5,577.34

Monthly Allowance: $400.00

Insurance: $642.44 

Compensation: $4,500.00

Travel to Appointments (Gas): $34.90

A couple and, in their case, their surrogate, “graduates” from the fertility clinic at 12 weeks. This is often that magic number in pregnancies, and here too, the fertility doctor saw it as a good measure of the pregnancy’s viability, that they could move on to the big leagues, the world of the OBGYN. 

When he thinks back on their own graduation—when he looks at that picture of them with Lena and the fertility doctor, arms wrapped around each other, big smiles, a thumbs up from Neil, a long stream of sonogram pictures hanging from one of Theo’s hands—he has no more connection to that happiness. He can only think of something the nurse said to them as they left. 

What leaves here, stays. 

She had asked him how he was feeling and he had confessed some apprehensiveness, some nervousness. He didn’t want to be too confident, and she had sought to assuage his fears. 

He marvels now at the absurdity, the power of her words, at the cruelty of the universe. Did he remember that moment so well because of what would and did happen? Had non-linear time already guided his memory, locking that in? If it had never happened, would he, paradoxically, never have needed to remember that moment? Did she, in the same way, remember saying this and does she now look back in awe at the incongruousness of her words and reality? 

Did she ever say it again to anyone else after she learned what happened to them?

He certainly hoped not. 

June Total: $5,612.76

Monthly Allowance: $400.00

Insurance: $642.44 

Compensation: $4,500.00

Travel to Appointments (Gas): $70.32

He was in Marrakech for work, another boring conference in an exotic setting that he barely had any time to explore. 

One evening, in the middle of the conference week, Theo was having cocktails with some colleagues in the hotel bar. He was all out of sorts–tired of work conferences, bored of his generally nice colleagues, but mostly dying to get word from Neil and Lena regarding her seven-week appointment. 

As he was ordering his second drink at the bar, his phone started buzzing, and he found several messages of pictures of sonograms and a video of the fertility doctor talking and pointing animatedly to a screen of black and white blobs. Relief flooded him, began to pour out of his eyes. He stepped away to regain composure and gaze at his phone in wonder. 

A few minutes later, Theo went back to his colleagues feeling desperately lonely–they weren’t telling anyone yet–but unbelievably happy. 

By the end of his trip, he had never felt so relieved to be going home. He was sick, which often happened at these conferences, and he wondered if it was partly the toll of the physical distance from Neil, Lena and their babies. He felt the guilt of being on the other side of the world from them, the fear that something could happen while he was gone. 

Nothing’s going to happen, he could hear Neil saying, in that confident way of his. 

Theo, who often felt guilty or worried or nervous about something, tried to listen to the Neil in his head and push these thoughts away.

May Total: $4,121.84

Monthly allowance: $400.00

Insurance: $642.44

Embryo Transfer Fee (2nd Attempt): $1,500.00

Travel Costs (Gas): $240.00

Hotel: $139.40

Companion Costs: $400.00

Per Diem: $100.00

HCG Positive Result (2nd Attempt): $700.00

The first time, a few months earlier, they only made it to seven weeks. They found out on Valentine’s Day, and they ended up arguing over fried chicken, earning strange looks from the rest of the restaurant. Theo doesn’t even remember what they were fighting about, he just remembers that he was hurting, and he didn’t know how to express it or make it feel better. 

Over the following few months, while Lena recovered and the doctor determined when she might be able to try again, Theo struggled with the idea of starting over. He was impatient to do so, but also overwhelmed at the thought: all the emotions, all the worrying, the wondering, the waiting. 

When it finally was time to try again, they wanted to make sure they attended the embryo transfer, which they hadn’t done the first time. They had wondered if their absence had somehow set things off on the wrong foot (though, to be fair, their thinking was that they had not wanted to pressure or hover over Lena during such a delicate process). They decided it was better for them to be there for moral support, both for Lena and for the miniscule embryos that she would carry.  

The actual event proceeded with little fanfare and took only a couple of minutes. The doctor first confirmed his and Neil’s names and the names on the syringe to make sure he was transferring the correct embryos. This struck Theo as a rather simplistic system, and he tried not to think about the recent stories he had read of fertility clinic mix-ups. Then the doctor inserted the syringe as he watched the ultrasound to see where to release the embryos. When he was done, he told Lena to take it easy and to think sticky thoughts. 

On their way out, the nurse handed them a “picture” of the embryos that had been transferred. Theo smiled at the crudeness of the black and white picture: it looked like some scribbles had been printed out from the computer that had been sitting in his parents’ basement for the last 30 years. He loved it. 

He loved imagining what would come from these scribbles. Who would they be? What would they look like? What would they call them? 

Oh how he couldn’t wait to meet them.