Listen with Your Heart

Well, we did it... We told my mom.

I've been nervous about this for so long, trying to figure out the best way and timing to reveal to my mom that we used donor eggs to help us conceive our babies.  As you know, my mom has some strong feelings about IVF in general and has a very strong faith in God and her religion. Because of this, I have not always felt supported by her in my attempts to have a family. My initial thought is that she would greatly disapprove of this method of family building. I was so anxious that the night before we decided to tell her, I slept like crap and had major anxiety dreams.

Tidy and I went back to see our families this past weekend to celebrate his sister and her husband's 30th birthdays. A few days before that we had a discussion and decided it was time to tell the rest of our immediate families. Up until this weekend, recall, only my 3 sisters and my dad know about our donor egg choice (and a few of our closest friends here in town), but we had made the decision to tell everyone else... at some point... we just hadn't figured out when.

Tidy started to think about it and realized that he'd really like to tell his family sooner than later. He felt like it would have been pulling the wool over everyone's eyes to have them wait to meet our babies first and then tell them after the fact about Dotty 2.0 and what a wonderful gift that she's given to our family. He wanted them to be able to absorb the information and see if they have any questions and get used to the idea if they needed to before they arrive.

I was still on the fence about the best time to tell my mom, but I didn't want her to be the last to know, or have others know, not tell her, and have her find out from others. I also didn't want others to be in a position to have to keep this secret from her.

So we took the plunge and decided to tell her.

My mom and I had plans to go shopping together on this past Saturday to look for maternity clothes for me ... I BOUGHT MY FIRST PAIR OF MATERNITY TROUSERS FOR WORK!!!!! WHEEEEEEE!!!!!!... So I thought before we went, I wanted to sit and have a nice conversation with her. I wasn't exactly sure how to frame it, but when I went into the bathroom near the kitchen, I was looking on the shelf and there were a few little pray booklets sitting there... Serendipitously, one was titled "Listen With Your Heart" and I thought, how perfect is that?!...exactly the approach I will take with my mom... ask her to listen with her heart.

And so I sat her down at the kitchen table with Tidy and I and asker her just that... please, listen with your heart...  and proceeded to tell her how, back in April, we had my sisters up for a visit and charted out all of our options: Surrogate, Adoption, Donor eggs... not really knowing the right path to go down, but having a feeling that I really could carry a baby and we just needed some healthy embryos, we decided to look for a gracious woman to give us a gift... a seed... to help us on this journey. I was tearing up as I told her how much we were thankful for this opportunity and how glad we are we were able to go down this path.

And she teared up as well and simply said, "god has given us these babies to have in our family"... She thanked us for telling her. And I let out a big sigh of relief.... no judgement, as I was expecting, no negativity about our choice, as I was anticipating... just simple acceptance and listening with her heart.

My mom was definitely the rock star of this weekend!